The Last Cold War Casualty : A Nest of Spies

With scarcely time for a decent wake, the Cold War spy novel was buried 24 hours after the Berlin Wall cracked open. I, for one, am not among the bereaved.

Yet it’s fitting that the spy novel, at least the Cold War variety, would die in Berlin--in that gray, drab, wisecraking town that even in sunshine looks as if it had stepped out of a 1930s newsreel.

In 1958, three years before the wall went up, you could catch a taxi in front of the Hotel am Zoo and roll into the Eastern Sector through the Brandenburg Gate. Once in East Berlin, there were gray, unsmiling people and Stalinoid architecture to look at.

West Berlin, even then, was a gigantic East-facing billboard that advertised all the consumer trinkets a world had to offer. Subsidized by the billions of deutsche marks that the Bonn government pumped into the Western Sector, the big billboard did its work and, by 1961, up to 3,000 East Germans were streaming into West Berlin each day, quite a few of them spies. And waiting were American, British and French spycatchers.

So it’s only natural that West Berlin, an island city in a hostile land, would attract more than its share of spies, confidence men, free spirits, fanatics and novelists. Berlin, after all, was the Cold War Junction.

But when the wall cracked open, the Cold War spy novel support system was removed and it ceased to breath--although others claim it simply died from extreme old age.

Ian Fleming and his insufferable James Bond started the Cold War spy novel craze in the mid-’50s, followed in the ‘60s by better writers and grimmer spies. Who can forget the last scene in John le Carre’s “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold,” with Alec Leamas astride the wall and that middle-aged fussbudget, George Smiley, safely on the Western side, urging Leamas to, “Jump, Alec! Jump, man!”

Equally memorable, to me at least, are the wicked plotting in Len Deighton’s “Funeral in Berlin” and the graphic portrayal of that divided city in W.T. Tyler’s “The Man Who Lost the War.”

For 28 years, the 29-mile-long, 13- to 15-foot-high wall served novelists as a formidable physical, political and even moral barrier to be tunneled under, smashed through or hopped over. At least it did as long as its official name was “the Anti-Fascist Protective wall.” But who can much care about North Atlantic Treaty Organization spies sauntering back into West Berlin past smiling East German guards through what’s now called “a fortified border”?

When the wall went up on Aug. 13, 1961, the United States was caught napping. There were the usual cries for action, even for tanks to knock it down. But John F. Kennedy, in a reflective moment, reportedly asked what would happen if the wall were knocked down? He answered his own question by predicting they would only rebuild it 50 yards farther east.

The United States was again caught napping--as was the world--when the wall opened up on Nov. 10. Many predicted this to signal the beginning of the end of the Cold War. But even if the wall eventually serves as a tombstone for both the Cold War and the novels it inspired, it will not mark the end of novels about spies.

If we are destined to endure, and perhaps even enjoy, an era of semi-civility with the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries, then the American novelist specializing in international intrigue must cast about for new villains.

In a pinch, the United States itself could fill that role nicely--unless the American novelist has qualms about bashing his own country. It is, anyway, a job much better left to such British writers as Le Carre and, especially, Graham Greene, who are quite good at it.

For the American novelist in search of new foreign antagonists there are several candidates. At the top of a rather short list is Panama--particularly now that the Bush Administration and Congress have acknowledged that fatal accidents can happen to almost anyone.

Back in President Gerald R. Ford’s Administration, it was official policy that “No employee of the United States government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.” But that was then and this is now--when the United States must deal with the likes of Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega, invariably referred to by the media as “the Panama Strongman,” which makes him sound rather like a professional wrestler.

The intriguing problem the Bush Administration faces should delight any novelist: How to dump the Panama Strongman without dirtying U.S. hands?

No less an authority than the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William H. Webster, has been pondering this. In a curiously frank interview, Webster was quoted as saying, “When despots take over, there has to be a means to deal with that short of making us to be hired killers.”

The recent failed coup in Panama was led by the late Maj. Moises Giroldi Vega, who captured the Panama Strongman only to leave him alone with a telephone. Noriega, of course, used the phone to summon reinforcements and Giroldi was promptly executed--with many reports that Noriega pulled the trigger.

It was left to the widow of the coup leader to predict Noriega’s fate in one-syllable words. “The next time,” said Adela Bonilla de Giroldi, “he has to be the first one killed.”

Political assassinations have long been the stuff that spy novels are made of, and if the thriller novelist posits that the wily Panama Strongman does meet with a fatal accident, the writer’s only remaining problem is to decide whether Noriega should leave behind an infernal device that, in the event of his accidental death, will blow up the Panama Canal.

The final chapter could be full of stuff about some cold-eyed, firm-jawed CIA agent, accompanied by a beautiful, patriotic Panamanian woman--who just happens to be a brilliant engineer--as they race the clock to find and defuse the infernal device. To avoid having events overtake him, the novelist should not spend more than six weeks writing this.

For novelists who prefer to set their spy thrillers in the not-too-distant future, there is always Hong Kong. By visiting for a couple of weeks now, the competent novelist can write a gripping tale about what will happen during the final months of Hong Kong’s status as a British crown colony, before China takes over. With a little imagination, the final days of Hong Kong could be made as thrilling a tale as the final days of Saigon.

A third plot suggestion is to have a cashiered U.S. Marine Corps lieutenant colonel, financed by a Colombian drug lord, lead a rag-tag band of mercenaries, including at least one backslid ex-KGB agent, on a raid that will rescue U.S. hostages from Arab terrorists and thus redeem both the drug lord and the colonel. There could be a lot of robust male bonding in this one.

In only a few months it will be a quarter of a century since I wrote my first and last Cold War spy novel. I called it “The Christmas Help,” but my publisher, fearful bookstores would relegate it to the section for Yuletide hints, called it, “The Cold War Swap”--a title I still detest.

Like many Cold War spy novels, mine was set in Bonn and Berlin. When the wall opened up this month, I remembered one of the novel’s principal characters had made a prediction about how long the wall would endure. “That wall,” my character said, “isn’t coming down--not in our lifetime.”

There’s much to recommend being a false prophet.